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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
So war has not only been proximate, it's been foundational.
Robyn Marasco:The citizen was always presumed to be a potential soldier.
Warren Montag:It is useful to see the kinds of strategies that Mike is talking about as ways to eliminate the fog and friction of war.
Mike Hill:Everybody, my name is Mike Hill. I'm a professor in the English department at SUNY Albany. I'm also a member of the Institute for Public Health and the Environment and a core member of the reenlightenment group. And I'm the author of On Posthuman War, Computation and Military Violence, which we're gonna talk about today.
Warren Montag:I'm Warren Montag. I teach English literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
Robyn Marasco:And I am Robin Morasco. I teach political theory at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at CUNY.
Mike Hill:Well, thank you both, Warren and Robin, for for agreeing to do this. I so much appreciate both your presence here and and also your having taken the time to to read the book. The title of the book on posthuman war and the subtitle computation and military violence, you know, has some keywords clearly in it. And and one of them turns out to be a word that I'm not terribly wedded to, but it's there as a kind of shorthand, and that word is posthuman. And I suppose I'm less interested in in the post part of the posthuman than I am in in the human part.
Mike Hill:Its history is a a a political concept, one that dates back at least as far as the enlightenment. It's connected specifically with western modernity and and has to do with what we call civil society, the public sphere. The idea that there is a realm of reason and dialogue, intersubjectivity and give and take that is somehow absolutely separate from political coercion, let alone certain kinds of violence and especially military violence. And this is something that is is core to an entire history of of natural law theory going back through Locke and Hobbes and lots of other names that I'm sure people know. One of the premises there then is that the state has a monopoly over where violence is used and that one of the big no nos for a human being per se or a citizen to claim rights is that whatever political agency that citizen or that rights bearing human being has, Those politics have to exist at the level of discussion.
Mike Hill:As Kant says, argue but obey. And what you obey is the law. And when you break the law, the state then decides that political force or force of one kind or another may be useful. The historical irony of all this, of course, is that as everybody knows who studies the enlightenment, that this was a period not only of, rational discourse in the dawn of the public sphere, but extreme violence. And and that that violence occurred in a way that was exterior, to civil society or so was the claim, but also often hidden.
Mike Hill:That is, it existed at the periphery. This is, of course, at the time of of of colonialism and nothing short of the radical forms of military violence and occupations of other places to produce the kind of wealth necessary to go into the public sphere so that people could claim rights in the first place. And it also ought to be said that those rights have to do with the possession of private property and wealth and so on. So if we had this historical paradigm where the human being per se is defined as a civilianized member of civil society and, participant in the public sphere outside of political force, the post in post human war is suggesting that something else is happening or has happened. And the term I use to talk about that something else is desivilianization.
Mike Hill:That is, after nine eleven, the connection between citizen or civilian, let's say, and soldier and combatant becomes rather tenuous. And it's not tenuous in a sort of accidental way. It's it's tenuous in a in a quite legal way. I mean, the, surveillance apparatus that gets put into place after nine eleven, the idea that, every citizen may also be a suspect, and you can think about the massive kinds of data dumps and other forms of computational, surveillance that that occurs during that period. I think ushered in a moment of, again, what I call desivilianization.
Mike Hill:We can look at that not just internally to civil society, and there are other examples of that we can name, but also the way in which the battlefield itself, exterior to the nation state, taking care of course of the global war on terror, gets reconstituted such that what we're talking about now are no longer fighting on clearly demarcated battlefields with strict lines of opposition. That this is a network centric way of thinking about the enemy, where not only could the enemy be your next door neighbor or the enemy could be you, but that on the battlefield, new techniques of war are being put into place. And so in chapter one, I talk about what's called the revolution in military affairs, which looks specifically at identity in a civil society context or at least in a nonmilitary context to use things like the human terrain system programs, which are anthropological forms of research to to look at civilian population patterns, to look at kinship relationships, to look at even things like population flows that are now perceptible from the perspective of of, say, a loitering drone. These are examples of what some of the counterinsurgency field manuals called achieving identity supremacy or even as a form of counterinsurgency using what they call, identity infiltration.
Mike Hill:And so when we start thinking about terms like the human being or the self or the citizen or identity, terms that used to be thought about as, you know, desibilianized or rather civilianized terms or become a civilianized in these ways, we start to see patterns between, the so called homeland and, what's happening, on the battlefield. So I'm interested in a couple of things in the core of the book. One is demography, how identities are are traced and how they interact. The other is anthropology, which is a long history connected to, to warfare, which we can talk about. And then the third chapter, and I'll just end with the overview here, talks about war neuroscience.
Mike Hill:And so what is interesting to find out as one looks at the research going on on the human brain that is connecting cognition to data and then, therefore, to weaponry, is that the brain itself, its very architecture, is described as a battlefield domain. And at least in the eyes of the researchers is a kind of seamless expansion, right, that absorbs both civil society, the external battlefields, and even the human body itself, it turns out, at the very end. The final thing I'll say just by word of overview is the other key word, and that is computation. The idea that in the same way that we talked about the enlightenment period as being one where the human being per se takes on these modern meanings. The media revolution that occurs at that particular time is, of course, print culture, reading, writing, circulation of books, magazines, newspapers, and so on.
Mike Hill:And it's a it's a big part of the establishment of civil society. Clearly, there's been another media revolution that we can talk about, and that is computation. And so, again, when you read some of the military research, what they talk about very often is data as a kind of war material. One of their favorite phrases is bullets, beams, and data. And the assumption there is that if it can be turned into numbers, then it can also be directed towards a military, outcome.
Mike Hill:And so these techniques, for example, in the human training systems program or in some of the military neuroscience and in some of the identity infiltration techniques are all fundamentally computational. They don't occur by one set of eyes looking at another set of eyes. They occur through biometrics. They occur through really complicated algorithmic forms of, of surveillance and population control. And so the computational part of the project here, ought to be also be something that's put alongside that that term human being.
Warren Montag:Okay. First of all, I wanted to say that the strength, and I think, Mike's book is an extraordinarily useful and very well researched text that's overflowing with information, sort of in imitation of the object of the book in some way. I think anyone who reads it can easily feel overwhelmed because there are many it's pointing in many different directions. And one of the ways that I tried to cope with that is to look at the critiques within the military of the strategy that's, was outlined in 02/2006 with, General Petraeus and the idea of terrain to not just to the human, but also really to everything. It's a kind of totalizing idea, which poses huge problems for the military.
Warren Montag:But one of the things that I found very useful is that a number of commentators who are in the military said that, in fact, we could understand, Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy in terms of Clausewitz in in a certain way, the on war. And he talks about two things that I think are very much at play. And the the for example, the various versions of field manual three dash 24 on counterinsurgency, which first came out in, twenty o six. And Clausewitz has two concepts that keep getting referred to. The fog of war, which has to do with knowledge that at any given time, there is so much that you can't see.
Warren Montag:At that time, it was taken as a immutable category because you can never eliminate that fog, and you have to sort of figure out how to maneuver within it. And then also, sort of the corollary to that is the friction of war, which is, all the unforeseeable elements, forces that prevent the, an army from achieving what once appeared to be easily achievable goals. And I think it's it's very useful to use that to understand what was going on in twenty o six because, as we know, I don't wanna go into the history in any detail, but it was a disaster in twenty o six, Iraq and Afghanistan. And, the military had obviously stumbled into something that they had absolutely no preparation for and were caught off guard in many different ways. And so Petraeus made a kind of bold effort, which I think we can say now was was a complete failure in many ways, which doesn't mean it won't continue, but it was a complete failure, to extend the battlefield or the the terrain to the totality of what's in front of him.
Warren Montag:And it was very demanding. And, I mean, looking at the precise wording of the of the field manual in any of its versions, what I found absolutely stunning was the the ignorance and the naivete in that document where you can just learn a culture in a matter of a few months. And if you just walk out among the people instead of remaining inside your armored vehicle, then this is the solution to a problem of knowledge because you'll see what's going on, etcetera. And then you learn all their customs. You know, like you could read, like, like, an etiquette book or something and then know what to do, what not to do.
Warren Montag:And then, you know, finally, as he he says in a very funny way, yes. You might even learn their language. Yeah. I mean, it's it's sort of mind boggling that someone could say that at that point in that that, conflict. And this is of course, it leads to, much more complicated scenarios and a sense of how complicated this new battlefield is.
Warren Montag:It's not something you can just automatically draw up and and use like a map or something. So I think it is useful to see the kinds of strategies that Mike is talking about as ways to eliminate the fog and friction of war in that sense. And I think, if we look at the three categories, demography is extremely important. We can see that there was an invasion of a country that for the US military was basically homogeneous, except for clearly identifiable and historically, you know, very important minority groups. There was no sense I mean, there wasn't even a clear sense that the Arabic that's spoken in Iraq is not the same that's spoken in other places or even within Iraq.
Warren Montag:It may be very difficult for one person to understand another person's dialects, etcetera. And, the the number of languages wasn't really known, which is kind of extraordinary. And, there was some very vague notion of these minority groups, but it wasn't very serviceable. So Petraeus was proposing, and I don't think he knew the extent of what he was proposing, to begin to figure out, like, how many different groups they are, how is the society organized in terms of given populations according to ethnicity or tribal membership, which is important there, and, also in Afghanistan. And, I think that what they then embarked on was an impossible mission of a kind of totalization of all this information.
Warren Montag:And what happened, as, one of the commentators says, is that there was overload and the entire gathering of data became impossible. There was so much information and so little ability to filter out the accurate, the inaccurate, the partially accurate, etcetera, that it actually just set up a whole new set of problems. With with the demographic approach, there's even a concentration on, you know, the typical modes of inquiry or kinds of inquiry that we associate with demography. Are people starving? Are they hungry?
Warren Montag:Are they malnourished? What is their economic status? Are they employed, unemployed? You know, just to gather that data in a short period of time in a way that could be used by the military is impossible as they found out. So it was the beginning of a kind of project of information that was doomed to failure from the start, And its naivete was that belief that, oh, this could all be done quite easily with new computational techniques and, you know, statistical models for analyzing data, etcetera, etcetera.
Warren Montag:K? And then the, anthropological chapter of Mike's book is extremely maybe even more important in a certain way because this is where the US army had to deal with Islam. They couldn't just read a book. They began to confront the fact that there are different branches of Islam, that even within Sunni or Shiite Islam, there are many differences, and people, may have, you know, sharp antagonisms that they're not aware of. And Islam, you know, really texts like the Quran is not at all an easy thing that one just you just pick up the Quran and leaf through it or something like that.
Warren Montag:Again, they discovered that this civilization or society that they regarded as rather simple in some ways was extraordinarily complicated. And then they had things like when they looked at manners, like etiquette, etcetera, the binary opposition that's proposed in the the field manual is formal and informal. So manners, the way you interact with other people is either formal, which it appeared that the Iraqi model was formal, and the Americans are informal. It's absurd. It's it's completely ethnocentric in every possible way.
Warren Montag:It's completely inaccurate. And so the magnitude of the problem posed by Petraeus' strategy is, you know, becomes more apparent with every, aspect of life that they want to investigate in the army. What happened was that the US army was constantly creating conflicts, which functioned as
Robyn Marasco:friction
Warren Montag:that impeded them at every step, and they couldn't gather sufficient information, which just appeared to complicate everything even more. It didn't lead anywhere except for despair and then withdrawal. And one of the things just the neuroscience chapter is very, very interesting. And I think it is important not just for, how to infiltrate the brain, but also how to extend the perceptual capacities of the individual soldier through, you know, we might call prosthetic devices that, you know, that they end up in many cases wearing on their body, that record information, that analyze information, transmit information, and that too produces contradictions. It endangers the very soldiers that it's supposed to aid and and, make more safe by forcing them into situations where they're the data gatherers.
Warren Montag:The critiques of this within the army, the critiques of the human terrain strategy. I think there's a notion that it's impossible to actually operationalize the idea of a human terrain, that there's so many variables, so many areas, and the more you know, the more you have to know, and it becomes a burden whose profit for the military is very murky. And we can see now a reaction against it. Just finally, One of the most interesting articles that I read very recently was from 2020 by a member of the military. The title of the article is why the Taliban is unbeatable.
Warren Montag:And this is produced by an army officer, somebody who had been a commander. And he gave a very good description, not of the, you know, every detail of Taliban life or something like that, but he could describe why they were able to win, not only militarily, which they did, which is extraordinary in many ways, but also to get the allegiance of the people and leaving the resistance to their their program really isolated to Kabul. And, it's it's something that's very difficult for people to understand or to accept. But I think that the military produced this, commentary, which I think was shared not openly by many people. That that was an impossible conflict.
Warren Montag:They would never win, and that's, led to the withdrawal. I think there's a lot to discuss, and I think it's an extremely rich book that, we'll be going back to many times.
Mike Hill:Yeah. Thinking back to 02/2006 and and specifically Petraeus is a sort of figure head of what they call very explicitly the rise of the of the scholar soldiers. So it's not just this citizen combatant, it's a scholar soldier. I think one of the reasons that term is worth holding on to or at least thinking critically about, it it has to do with this issue of knowledge information management. I mean, portrays as a PhD in international studies from Princeton, the counterinsurgency field manual that that Lauren mentioned was produced by the University of Chicago Press, practically a bestseller.
Mike Hill:It probably outsold a lot of our own books. And the word that gets used in there over and over is culture. It's a keyword in that book. And it says that, you know, for us to to fight the war that we're gonna now need to fight, right, which is a multi front war. And in fact, the word multi, I think, is what Warren was trying to get at in referencing Clausewitz and the idea of the sort of spatial and temporal complexities of posthuman war, which is this idea of fog, which is, you know, not knowing and not having a complete sense of the battlefield.
Mike Hill:Because once you make everything an area of operation, if you think that through, there really is no position from which you can find an oppositional relationship to an enemy without that enemy turning into something that either disappears or pops up in places you don't expect. And that's the problem of a network centric battlefield. Now on the one hand, that's gonna produce a lot of fog and a lot of friction. That is things are gonna not go well when you think they're gonna go well. And on the other hand, what it did for the scholar soldier in theory, and the theory didn't work out as as Warren rightly says, is that it just puts a new opportunity in play.
Mike Hill:And that opportunity is is informational. They call it full spectrum warfare. Right? It means that everything is operational. The fact that Defense Department secretary Gates, right, people will remember Gates, and and was also the university president, said many important things addressing the American, university professors.
Mike Hill:Where he's actually talking about the importance not just of bringing civilian knowledge practices, into alignment with what we can and should be doing for issues of security, but especially fields, he says, in humanities and
Warren Montag:in the liberal arts and social sciences.
Mike Hill:And this was a, you know, interesting development alongside the corresponding disintegration of those fields in their traditional senses in terms of at least support majors, faculty hires, and so on in in the universities to see a strange backdoor revitalization of humanistic thinking as a militarized application is another part of of this problem. And Gates is is very clear about that. In the human terrain systems program, For example, you could see job ads, and I applied for one, just for kicks, that read a lot like sort of the an MLA job description, you know, rewritten with a military goal at the end. You know, it the word cultural studies was used without irony in some of these human trade system program applications. So the goal was to put experts in the humanities disciplines, let's just say, or humanistic kinds of concerns, but then to recalibrate.
Mike Hill:That's probably exactly the appropriate word to recalibrate humanistic discourse in a military fashion. So that was the promise. And the reason that the promise didn't pan out was exactly as Warren says and this, I think also just worth emphasizing. It was a promise predicated upon a presumption of the ability to process more faster. And the way you do that is not through traditional ways of thinking, reading, writing, discussing, all those old civil society modalities, right, that we recognize as maybe part of modernity and maybe no longer part of the present because computation is also the emphasis in all of the revolution and military affairs discourse and in all of the counterinsurgency strategy material.
Mike Hill:They thought they were gonna learn the lessons from the strategic hamlet initiatives of the Vietnam War, where some of these cultural practices were put into place for the first time, for, uses of population control and surveillance, which also failed because they thought the lack of of computational power. And so there were gonna be new forms of mapping, real time census taking, all kinds of variations beyond just the usual ones that you can see with human eyes that were gonna be put into this fast database that was gonna beam back just like the drone, you know, commands are to various data centers in The US and then beam back to the soldiers so that all these kinds of control could happen, which didn't. But the premises, in other words, was all I'm trying to to get at here of this being a knowledge operation and a cultural operation and one that in that involves a promise about, you know, computational power was how the the posthuman war promise, right, was set up.
Robyn Marasco:Thanks. I just first wanna thank you, Mike, for writing this book and for the invitation to talk about it here. And maybe I'll say a a few things just about the book and the kind of reader's experience of the book, which I also appreciate. There's a kind of cinematic quality, and I think Warren alluded to one dimension of this, the kind of proliferation of images and information and kind of lines of potential inquiry and analogies and metaphor. There's even a sort of reflection on analogy.
Robyn Marasco:And so there's something in the kind of in that experience that reads a cinematic. There's also, I think, surprising resemblances between major, kind of characters and figures in the plot. Right? And so we get the US military and the American Anthropological Association, resembling one another in a surprising narrative twist. Right?
Robyn Marasco:We get a kind of university, DEI, multicultural liberalism being echoed in the Petraeus strategy. Right? So we get, again, in this, like, quasi cinematic, experience, we get, the kind of resemblance between perhaps our assumed villains and our assumed heroes that we hadn't expected. And then finally, I mean, sort of masterfully, we get this cliffhanger ending that in the manner of all contemporary Hollywood cinema ends on the opening to part two to the next installment. We get the cliffhanger ending that opens to the next study contribution installment, which is going to be on ecology and posthuman war.
Robyn Marasco:So there's something I just think of a, like, formal exercise that's kind of marvelous about it. I appreciate also the way that it opens with a proper preface and opening in which, Mike, you describe your own experience as a journalist, scholar, participant in a kind of simulated boot camp experience on Parris Island. And so I'd like us to talk maybe a little bit in our discussion about what that experience was for you, what you felt yourself initiated into, and the process of unmaking and remaking that is a kind of classical part of the sort of boot camp experience and and I think embedded in the mythology of the US military. You know, I think this is a book in general about how what you're calling posthuman war and I appreciate that you began with your ambivalence around that term, or at least the way that you weren't necessarily wedded to that term. I think that term for you is to mark or note the displacement of a set of dualisms through which we have come to understand the conduct of war and are being kind of upset by some of its contemporary technologies and the applications of those technologies.
Robyn Marasco:And I take the primary dualism in some sense to be the dualism that defines war and politics itself. And so that's why you keep returning to class fits that gets then kind of rewritten and revised by Foucault, but I think you're suggesting must be rethought entirely in the wake of what I think Warren is rightly calling the Petraeus strategy. I'm sort of interested in the dualisms that remain, or maybe even the dualisms that get shored up in the context of those other dualisms that collapse or at least fall into disrepair. I was sort of reading in the context of thinking about the politics of gender and sexuality in the present, how it relates to the reorganization of kind of military logics and applications, a particular politics of gender, sexuality and the family that has emerged on the right and how it relates to this kind of new conduct of war. And in this regard, I have a number of different questions.
Robyn Marasco:The first and I guess most basic is, have we ever been civilians? The sort of very argument about the de de civilianization of civil society might be premised on a certain understanding of the construction of civil society that was itself premised on a certain politics of gender, a certain politics of manhood, that organized manhood into particular domains, and that from a different perspective, perspective, it might appear that we have never been fully civilian in a number of ways, in the ways that the citizen was always presumed to be a potential soldier tasked with the protection of the nation, all of the potential sacrifices, but also honors and rewards that come with that. But also the way that the family itself, you could say, in its hierarchy and its powers, were always premised on the possibility of a masculine violence that circulated, at least in an imaginary or ideological way, outside the home and made, in some sense, the home itself, the family, as a kind of fortress. And the citizen, therefore, as always, with respect to his own household, a kind of soldier. And so, for me, it's no surprise that we have the overturning of Roe v.
Robyn Marasco:Wade and new laws restricting abortion at the very same moment that we have a pretty radical redefinition of our gun culture, gun politics, and gun laws, in which I think there's some relationship between the two. It's not just about the new conduct of war, the posthuman war, the citizen combatant, the citizen who is also potentially fully armed with a military arsenal, but also the way that masculinity gets forged in that nexus. I sort of, throughout the book, wanted you to actually talk about the politics of manhood, both as it pertains to what seems to be your ongoing research interest in sites of what I might see as political masculinity, where, like, the politics of masculinity is, like, especially and that what seems to me so interesting here and might reflect that the Petraeus strategy is the way that women might be invited to participate in it. That in some sense, the new technologies, you know, the new neuroscience invites women in a kind of gender neutral way into a politics that they had been historically excluded from. And then also the particular anxieties that that provokes.
Robyn Marasco:So the particular kinds of politics that are responsive precisely to the way that women can now participate in a a kind of political masculinity. I'm also interested in hearing you say something in this regard about the mobilization of private citizens in, for instance, Texas, SB eight, the abortion law that activates a private citizenry as sort of vigilantes on behalf of a sort of new politics of the state, a kind of reproductive, a neonatalist politics of the state, it seems to me, relayed, again, without being too conspiratorial. And that's all ready to anticipate another comment I wanna make. But, like, without being too conspiratorial, I'm sort of interested in how you see these developments as the kind of home front of, a kind of politics of terrain. Maybe the final thing I'll raise is, for me, a question that really comes up, if you'll allow me to point to a specific passage in the book.
Robyn Marasco:It's something that comes up on page 69. You're in some sense describing what you've said to this point about the Gates doctrine, the national security strategy, and as it relates to The U. S. Census, a new sort of techniques of of gathering information about a citizenry, the Republican dream of a three way harmony among the individual, the public sphere, and the the state is apparently ended by the cruel awakening of posthuman war. This cruelty exists because the assault on civil rights has intensified according to a further securitization of civil rights.
Robyn Marasco:This is this marvelous story you tell us about actually the weaponization of racial difference to, in some sense, defeat a civil rights project and a racial justice project. And so I do think we have to get back to that cynical weaponization of a kind of right wing multiculturalism to precisely defeat a more emancipatory politics. But the thing I'm most interested in is the reference here you make to Kant. You quote Kant as saying, the state will invite their philosophers to help silently, making a secret of it. Right?
Robyn Marasco:He thus places emphasis on both what is absent to transcendental thought, as well as what cannot be said about knowledge if you're bent on intersubjectivity. Quite interested in this idea of the secret, what is unsaid, what cannot be said. It seems to me also has to be thought in relationship to kind of new conspiracisms, new forms of conspiracism, what we imagine cannot be said, the sort of secrets, the secret alliance between the state and its philosophers, that kind of hidden conspiracy between the state and the philosopher or the scholar that a figure like Gates or Petraeus might be seen to embody. I'd like to hear you say something about that, but I might also want to connect it to my thinking around the family because it's my own hunch that, like, the family, the household itself has long been thought to harbor a set of secrets, a kind of aristocratic alliance, women often the kind of emblems of it. So Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton can very weirdly come to, I think, stand in for this conspiracy imagined to be kind of harbored somewhere in the family.
Robyn Marasco:The family panic in our present is not just about, like, oh, my gosh, the decay of this institution, you know, the fall of patriarchy. It's also around an anxiety around a conspiracy, emblematized in women, in the power of women, in the authority of women, which has always weirdly existed and flourished in the family, even under patriarchy. I don't know if you feel this is quite a far, like, far afield from what you're interested in, but these are the set of things that, were sort of raised for me and thinking about the family, the military, the contemporary kind of conduct of posthuman war. Thanks.
Warren Montag:Can I just interject one quick thing?
Mike Hill:Sure.
Warren Montag:I was just thinking about, the well known misogyny that's typical of the far right today. I've I've talked to a number of people about the opening scene of the film, American Sniper, and it involves, having to kill a woman and a child walking down the street. And the woman, of course, is wearing, basically covering her entire body. If you look at testimonies and, and, statements by soldiers who served in Iraq, the attitude towards the women wearing that kind of clothing that covers their bodies is resentment, that they are denying the soldiers the pleasure. And they're they don't put it in that way, but they're denying the soldiers the pleasure of seeing them.
Warren Montag:The expectation and the demand in a way is that these women expose themselves to the soldiers, which they refuse to do. That's part of it. But the other side is the growing fear that this clothing is in fact used to hide, which it is in that film, used to hide weapons, explosives. It's like, mean, this goes back to the Battle of Algiers. It's something very similar.
Warren Montag:And so I I think the misogyny, that's one of many causes, but the war and the specific place that the war occurred, etcetera, helped formulate the current misogyny in many ways. The soldiers discussed with the hijab has nothing to do with feminism. It's the demand that you should expose yourself to me because I'm here, you know, helping you or something like that. I mean, you could connect it to everything, Robin, that you're just saying. It's part of that experience of, you know, this sort of neo colonial war.
Mike Hill:Mhmm. Mhmm. I really love the way this conversation is turning out because what I'm hearing are some really useful and powerful applications of some of the things that I tried to to suss out about the current moment and and and some shifts around how we understand privacy, how we understand publicity, and how we understand, political violence and specifically, you know, war. And I think if we could answer the question that Robin brilliantly put on the table, what is it that is so significant about this concurrence of a preoccupation with women and women's body? Let's say Roe v Wade.
Mike Hill:And we could also even add the hysteria over trans identity, you know, leading in drag to children who were completely innocent of the whole thing. This family panic, as as Robin put it in such an eloquent way, and then how that is absolutely an essential symptom of the weaponization of a sphere of intimacy, call it the self, call it identity. We could call it the private sphere or more accurately, and again, the gender politics are essential here, the domestic sphere. Clearly, when the the idea of the human being per se is being invented and there is the promise of this new universality, it is a universality of the absolute few, not just in terms of the numbers of bodies on the colonial periphery that produce the wealth that made it possible for the conjugal patriarchal figurehead to have the disposable income to either property to claim the home, to create the domestic sphere, which is supposed to lie outside of politics, outside of public discourse, and especially outside of the state. But that that alignment that you described, once it comes undone, that may be a way to explain the panic, the family panic.
Mike Hill:Right? That in other words, what I called autogenic war in this text, right, is maybe one way to explain the hypervigilance around sexuality and especially women's sexuality and women's bodies and reproductive rights. This now becomes privacy turned outward, but in this way that is totally subjected to vigilante forms of justice, let's just say, which is just another way to talk about, not just another, is another way to talk about the militarization of the human being per se or the citizen soul soldier. I think it might be possible to synthesize some of the other and thank you so much for for such a meticulous and and and thoughtful way to describe the book. In your reading of it, I I really liked what you said about the heroes and villains switching places sometimes.
Mike Hill:And that fluidity maybe is exactly what happens in the fog of war when you start to think in network centric terms rather than in terms of strict dualisms and opposition. And when you talk about dualisms in in the second part of your response, the other part of Clausewitz, since he's come up before, right, is his definition of war as politics by their means, or he says a dualism carried out on a mass scale. Right? That is the duality and dualisms is sort of all part of an earlier paradigm of war. Large armies, mass mobilization, people in uniforms, citizens at least theoretically, you know, distinguished from enemy combatants.
Mike Hill:But if we can just draw down on that question of duality itself, and maybe this is a way I can explain about, something about my experiences at Parris Island. The duality in play, at least as I arrived, was at least superficially one of researcher, professor, let's hope thinker in some way, and clearly not somebody who is going to be at least, at the onset arriving with a predisposition to really dig what I'm about to do. You know, it was I went there with suspicion and cynicism and, you know, all kinds of of carefulness about supping with the devil or the devil dogs as the crevice puts it. And yet, you mentioned before some experience with this, people that you're close to or that you know, part of the making of marines is the unmaking of the civilian. I experienced something there, and I don't wanna go on too much about my own experience, but it had to deal with that unmaking.
Mike Hill:By the when I arrived, I was distant. When I left, I was seduced to some degree. That is, the subject positions started to get a little bit fluid. And the thinker, the outside of war, the professor, we're distanced from that. I'm gonna analyze.
Mike Hill:I'm gonna write about it. I'm not a participant. I'm just an observer. My object of observation suddenly moved into a zone of proximity where I became a little more intimate with it than I might have liked. Same thing happened when I spent time with the neofascists in an earlier work and with the promise keepers.
Mike Hill:That is there's a way in which after weeks of immersion, you know, a kind of and and also the physical duress and the screaming and the sand fleas and the early hours and the exhaustion just wears you down. But as it wears you down, something else gets built up. And I don't know what that is, but it's a very seductive esprit de corps, you know, sort of feeling of collective purpose. It only seems possible outside of civil society relations too. Because once you enter into that sphere, you're subject to the code of military justice.
Mike Hill:That is to say, you have no more constitutional rights. You have to be civilianized to become that kind of comrade in a way. And so there was a really weird sort of fluidity, I suppose, where that duality question came into play just at least for me at the experiential level. The other term I mentioned, and maybe this gets to the the question a little bit more directly of of the what can't be said, which is the last thing that you mentioned. And this was a term I thought about too when Warren was talking, and then I'll try to open shut up it up for the floor a little bit.
Mike Hill:And I mentioned this before, autogenic war. That is at the same time you're trying to secure something, the thing you're trying to secure becomes more insecure for your having tried to secure it. You are a citizen, and for me to secure you fully, I have to identify you as a suspect. You might also be a terrorist. Everyone's a potential terrorist, remember, under the new Patriot Act and all the data dumps that we're subject to and all of the rest of it.
Mike Hill:Everybody's under surveillance all the time. There's no no need for a warrant, you know, or anything like that. Right? That's what it can be autogenic war. The distinction between war and peace, the spatial demarcations between battle zones and zones of peace are no longer there in any absolute sense.
Mike Hill:Right? And technology, at least in some sense, enables that to happen. The what goes unsaid, I think, has to do with that question that you raised. And I think it is that takes us right back to the question of gender and sexuality. Have we ever been civilians?
Mike Hill:I think the answer is absolutely not. War has always been, as my friend Chris Hedges says, the force that gives us meaning if The Us is the nation state that presumes to keep its citizens outside war. The US has been at war in one form or another since its founding over 90% of its existence, and that excludes all of the CIA backed assassinations of democratically elected leaders in countries we, quote, unquote, don't particularly like. Right? So war has not only been proximate, it's been foundational.
Mike Hill:To admit that, right, as part of the civil society story is to to introduce that no. Another way to introduce that no is to recover what's been silenced, and that is the history of political insurrection in this country or in other countries. That is to say within the fog of war when the people no longer becomes a people in the sense of maintaining that individual domestic sphere, civil society, state, coequivalence. But when the people decide to do what Kant says you can't do, which is not only to argue, but also to disobey, to take to the streets, to engage in forms of civil disobedience, to break the law on purpose. Right?
Mike Hill:To become militant in the small m sense of that word for purposes of political change of one form or another. It seems to me that the state has already made those assumptions. Let's say, for example, the folks in Georgia now protesting, Cop City, and they're doing it in on environmental grounds. You were kind enough to mention the next installment of this book, which will be on the weaponization of ecology. Whereas this was the weaponization of the human, the next will be the weaponization of things.
Mike Hill:They're now being, held under terrorism charges. Right? Not for breaking the law in this traditional sense of trespassing or private property issues, the things that when I was at Humboldt State University, the tree sitters were incarcerated for, which was, oh, you're on private property, you know, protecting the redwoods and that kind of thing. Well, now they're called terrorists. They're gonna be prosecuted accordingly, and that's that's true on the fore of the right as well as the left.
Mike Hill:I mean, the state is is opening up, you know, a whole zone of criminal prosecution to a more militarized, right, insurrectionary state violence sort of way of thinking. And so that ground seems to me already cleared by the Petraeus doctrine or the Gates doctrine, the revolution of military affairs. And this just seems to me, the domestic application of that. So I think that part of that silence of the history of a radically feminist rethinking of civil society and especially the private public split, and then the re the rethinking of that split and the reintegration of this under the heading of a more fully weaponized way of looking at, at the world, that that is also a silence that needs to be rendered speakable. And so to answer that question at the end, I think one way to do it is just to connect with the earlier parts of of your comments, you know, the slippage between the self and the object, the slippage between the thinker and the combatant, to me, is absolutely connected to the slippage around family and privacy and reproductive rights and and gender identity, and it is a motivator for that family panic, you know, that that you mentioned.
Mike Hill:So I I'm so grateful, to Robin for for putting that out there.
Robyn Marasco:Maybe I could steer us in a somewhat different direction and ask you to reflect on the ways that this book, I think, invites us to rethink and reconsider what has come to be diagnosed as the crisis in the humanities. It's precisely the scholar soldier who embodies the fusion of humanistic, sort of, civilizing education and the most sophisticated conduct of postmodern, late modern war. On the one hand, you could say this is an old story. You know, I'm housed in a political science department. The story of political science in America's long collaboration with the military industrial complex, the state department, US intelligence.
Robyn Marasco:You know, you could say, like, international relations itself is sort of birthed, as an intelligence op. Right? So there's a a few questions here. I mean, one question is, like, what is new, you know, with the technologies that you want and the science that you know, the birth of sciences that you wanna tell us have kind of shifted things in a substantial way. Not only what's new, but in some sense, what the kind of popular conversation around the crisis of the humanities actually masks and obscures.
Robyn Marasco:Right? So what kinds of silences does it participate in? And I think we're used to now appreciating the way that that talk obscures the role, especially of financialization and finance capital in the university. But I think you're telling this much more elaborate kind of everything everywhere story in which the university really sits right at the center of it, and not just the university as corporate engine, right, or as investment apparatus, but, like, actually humanities. The sort of humanities talk in the university is, like, right in the thick of it.
Robyn Marasco:And I think it invites us all to think very differently about how we've come almost reflexively, and I think this includes on the left, reflexively to sort of think about and talk about the crisis of the humanities, to imagine that they are in crisis as opposed to what I think you do quite well, which is to show actually how hegemonic some of our ideas, which we imagine to be dissident ideas, are. It turns out that the US military has integrated the insights of Badu maybe more powerfully than most English departments and most philosophy departments. And that, to me, is a really remarkable thing, and it's something that, you know, a certain kind of hand waving is insufficient to address. Like, a certain kind of, like, what are you guys doing is insufficient. It turns out that these people might be the most serious, sophisticated, and advanced readers of our traditions.
Mike Hill:Yeah. I wanna ask Warren to talk about this too because I know Warren has, for a very long time, worked on the question of humanism and theoretical antihumanism for a long time, and I've always admired his work on that. But the interesting thing that you bring up about trying to imagine, you know, this is a crisis and then suggesting that, well, the crisis of the humanities may only be apparent to people within the humanities who think that there was once upon a time this very stable and detached and disinterested and humanist way of doing things, which many of us know not to be true. I'll say that what you say about that you assimilation into the epistemomilitary arts, if you wanna use that term that I kick around in the book, is literally true. I mean, that's not just a theoretical observation.
Mike Hill:I mean, they they do read the Duluth at West Point. I I was there, conference in the one time and, found myself just jaw droppingly, you know, impressed by a young cadet's interest in the idea of the Rizome as a way to rethink the battlefield. And, of course, this has been used in a lot of poststructural French theory has been used very explicitly in a lot of counterinsurgency theory, which we could we could point to. But to circle back to the the humanities as it currently exists, I mean, I am as much of a participant observer who feels both attracted to and alienated by the university humanity system as I was when I was with the US Marines. I'm still, I suppose, in my own mind, somewhat of an imposter.
Mike Hill:My father didn't go to college and graduated from high school. Parents were very reluctant to see me leave the construction field and and and do something as audacious and maybe even emasculating, to go back to your earlier point, as getting a degree in English. It's always been a crisis situation of one form or another, and I'm surprised every day that I'm still here. The other thing I'm surprised about is the conservatism that passes on the progressive left. And I mean, in terms of just, you know, hey.
Mike Hill:We're losing majors. We're becoming defunded. It's time to go back to the basics and really dig in and protect the home turf. And and what the basics mean is to go back and protect a canon, to think in really traditional terms of human genius and imagination and an independent autonomous expression and, all of those things that are connected to the old notion of the human being in the humanities, which is a a detachment really from political reality and and especially political realities, you know, having to do with ways in which the the global economy has changed and then what it demands of the university. It no longer needs to produce the same kinds of workers or afford the privilege of non workers, if you wanna think about humanities professors, that it used to.
Mike Hill:Everything's become privatized. I mean, our our own university no longer, has the SUNY acronym in the front because the state has pretty much pulled out, you know, as you as you know, Robin, of the support of public research universities and everything here has become more or less privatized. But my disappointment in the response to that has been a kind of retrograde, it seems to me, reverse guard, you know, turning back to some notion of the creative and autonomous self or some notion of the university that has a kind of pristinely detached civic orientation as a alternatively, one that is engaged with the kinds of realities that we've been talking about. I'll say one more quick thing. It just and, again, it comes out of my own position in an English department, which is not terribly comfortable as a person who doesn't write a whole lot on literature.
Mike Hill:But we have a new college and a new major called the College of Homeland Security and Cybersecurity, and it's quickly become the most powerful, important college on campus. It went from a handful of majors when I was department chair, and we had a thousand majors in English at the time. We now have about 280 something, and they've got about a thousand something. So, you know, it's almost proportionally inverted in terms of the popularity of of at least that humanities discipline, and English was once one of the more popular humanities discipline to, you know, reorientation of work, of university work, right, along the lines of the security apparatus. And I go over there sometimes too, and I'm a little bit perverse in that way.
Mike Hill:And knock on people's doors and talk to them or go to TOCs and try to raise my hand and say, will you be my friend? And they say, no. It's you're in the humanities. Go over there. You don't belong in politics.
Mike Hill:You know? Anyway, or I know Warren wants to get to get in there. I hope he doesn't even.
Warren Montag:Well, yeah, I think if you look at English, I think that it's absolutely right to, point out that there was never some unopposed tradition that was very hegemonic for most of the century until the evil French theory and, other things happen. And people forget almost completely that the new criticism emerged in reaction to Marxism. And the theory that you look at a literary text completely separate from history is a testimony to that. And, you know, we see very similar things happening today, like, surface reading and other, maybe the new formalism, etcetera. But I think it's also important to keep in mind that every one of these is, is a field of contestation.
Warren Montag:We don't have the good theory and the bad theory because as Robin was saying, even the good theory today can very quickly become the bad theory. I mean, what I was thinking about as you were speaking was about big data approaches to literature. And I, I'm not in any way opposed to them. And I think that in many cases very, very interesting and very helpful. But you could see how easily that would be folded into an enlarged, portray a strategy of creating information that is useful for purposes of domination, etcetera.
Warren Montag:And, you know, also in a certain way, depending on how it's used, could be depoliticized and made to appear completely innocent. And I think that, as you were saying, Robin, that Kantian statement about philosophers helping but silently, secretly, in English, it's typically that way, that there's a not everybody, but I mean, there's a generalized denial on nearly everyone's part of the political effects, even if it has anything to do with their intentions. But it's the effects of what they're doing, the history of what they're doing, and they don't wanna think about that. They can't stand to bring in. I mean, it's it's a taboo to even bring politics into it many ways.
Warren Montag:And I think that that's what Althusser referred to as kind of objective alliance between theories and positions that otherwise are antithetical or antagonistic. But depending on the situation, they can enter into a kind of alliance that has nothing to do with their intentions, but their effects that, serves the the very dynamics that we're talking about, you know, in different ways. I mean, surface reading says let's never talk about politics. It's crap, etcetera. And then you have big data, which also, in the guise of a kind of statistical rigor, also evacuates politics.
Warren Montag:The big data theory, I think, is not lost or it's not destined to be something completely reactionary, but it's very difficult to create an awareness. People don't look at the effects of their their theoretical work. And, you know, that's part of the humanistic tradition. It's not what I wanted to do. It's not what I intend to do, and therefore, I'm innocent of the effects, etcetera.
Warren Montag:And I think that's a it's a very bad habit, and it depoliticizes things in a way that favors the powers that be and the tendencies that we're looking at now. So I think that it's absolutely true that there are myths and most exercises in literary theory or practice of literary theory just is silent about it. It's silent about its own contributions to what's going on. And also, you know, maybe it is silent to itself in that way that people don't see what's going on. I think it's right, and I think it's very important for us to raise those issues.
Mike Hill:Here's a just a quick point too, that gets us back to the history of the of the human, which is the only reason for using the post, just to indicate that there's a temporality to this and historical specificity to it. But there's a historical specificity to the discipline of English as well. And this is all worth pointing out, not just because it's concurrent with the history of the ideals of civilian life and all of those false oppositions specifically between domestic and public and public and state and so on that we've been talking about. It also plays a really important role in that. So if you think about the history of literature with a capital l, right, which of course before the eighteenth century would have meant anything written down.
Mike Hill:You were a good writer. You did literature. You could be in a lawyer or whatever else you you were, a philosopher, etcetera. The idea of, you know, literature, literary studies, English departments, you know, as a specifically autonomous realm of imaginative thinking where you trans transcend, you know, your material conditions and all the things that that you're supposed to forget and silence when you are in that realm of of spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling as as Wordsworth says. Right?
Mike Hill:It's very specific to this period that we're talking about and this way we're trying to think about change. The first literature departments, right, were colonial enterprises, India for one, English and and and Scotland was the other one, right, where the idea was to invent Englishness so that at the periphery, there could be an identification with the subordinator. It was also a question of of scale, you know, of bigness, of largeness. So it's not just a data problem now when we do surface reading and we think about how to create algorithms to search for patterns that we might not see and therefore and divorce it from politics. I mean, the scale of print production in the eighteenth century was absolutely massive compared to anything that had happened before the lapse of the licensing act in around sixteen ninety something.
Mike Hill:And so when you get these technological revolutions like steam driven press and cheap ink from India and cheap paper from the The Americas or what have you, right, you get another media revolution. And that media revolution is part and parcel of the of the invention of the civil society. And the way that it's dealt with is in a really interesting way because it's revealing about the kinds of false universalities that we're trying to describe. Right? That is the ones that seem to be superficially apparent, the human being per se, or how wonderful that's supposed to be when we know that in reality such a thing was invented by a small minority of people to benefit a small minority of people.
Mike Hill:Right? Even with that universality of the few. It's almost as if a kind of epistemic version of that ontological switcheroo took place in history, the discipline. So you've got this massive amount of print, whether it's broadsides or satirical ballads or subversive writing from workers who are revolting against the early forms of industrialization. And what you do is you invent a discipline to create that universality of the few.
Mike Hill:That is, you take a few representative texts and you say, this is now this thing we're going to invent called the canon. So the history of the English literature doesn't begin with Beowulf and then go forward through Brontes de Brecht. You know? It begins in the eighteenth century and goes backwards and forwards simultaneously, And it creates this false sense of continuity and historical, sameness that also values a small group of texts a large amount. Okay?
Mike Hill:Instead of valuing a large group of texts a large amount. And so if you were to do that, you would be involved in some of the archival recovery that would speak to your other question about women specifically and the history of the discipline in writing. Right? I mean, look at the traditional canon, and you have the philosophy of science, which I've been reading a bunch of lately. And so you can read and should, of course, you know, Bacon and Newton and Hooke and all the rest.
Mike Hill:But my god, there's some amazing stuff like Margaret Cavendish. It's just brilliant things going on in there with what's happening in her work. These are silent figures in the history of the discipline. And so the way that that media revolution was dealt with was through that same kind of sleight of hand, you know, a reduction and expansion. Reduce the number of texts.
Mike Hill:We'll pretend it expands out to everybody. But the everybody is an absolutely empty, idealized zone of, you know, delusion, I suppose you could say. But you would have to be thinking about the opposite of delusion as other than that which is superficially there. In other words, you'd have to look with the within those silences for what's repressed and what what is spoken about allusively, in the same way that that political violence within the history of civil society is there allusively, you know, silenced by the official histories, that we write. But one other quick thing, I'm reading a bunch of, climate change science fiction right now, and I'm trying to tinker with this idea because so much of them are about war.
Mike Hill:Right? I mean, so much of them are about it's like ecological revenge against the polluters and a lot of this stuff. At war, there's usually these insurgent groups like the children of Cali from India in the Kim Stanley Robinson novel. But what I'm noticing, and I'm teaching this class in climate change science fiction, and this goes back even to Octavia Butler's parable of the sower, which is an insurgence text, you know, lots of environmental insurgency texts. And it may just be a coincidence, but almost all of the, go back to the hero villain thing, the heroes are almost all women.
Mike Hill:In that, Vander Darian series, I'm noticing it in, you know, as I just said, the the Robinson thing. There just seems to be with these more militantly activated ecological revenge texts where women are playing this really important role. And I don't know if you've come across that or if you've seen that at all.
Robyn Marasco:Well, I'm I'm thinking about some film examples where, you know, you could think about, like, Terminator two as, like, the beginning of of this. Now what's interesting there is you get the woman who I think has a critique of the war apparatus, which is, like, you men, all you know how to do is make war. Right? Whereas I give life. So it's like the woman as, like, fertile bearer of life juxtaposed against, you know, the male destroyer of life.
Robyn Marasco:But, of course, like, what was so riveting about that film was the way that she did it in this, like, martial, militarized aesthetic. It was all about, you know, her essentially, like, combat training as a prisoner and her sort of readiness for war. So I'm constantly drawn back to that film as, like, a transitional film, you know, that, like, really opens to this kind of scrambling of gender. You could say this like post Title IX world where women can be soldiers, and, you know, where the Citadel is being reorganized on the basis of a claim to legal equality. Right?
Robyn Marasco:So, like, the way that that then not only impacts the military, but, like, impacts culture at the time. So we get Terminator two and we get GI Jane. I mean, what's striking about Terminator two is that it's so wrapped up in an environmental, ecological catastrophe as well. Then the other thing that you're making me think is the way war has colonized the imagination. This became really clear for me in the neuroscience chapter.
Robyn Marasco:Like, part of it really is about the activation of the brain as terrain. But the flip side of it seemed to be also about, like, the absence of other ways of, like, thinking about what this discovery could be. In some sense, the colonization of like a kind of martial war project on the human sciences. So that there's this like really no other way that we can talk about the brain except in this. And that for me is the other part of the story here in the context of environmental crisis and climate change.
Robyn Marasco:It's like part of the task is the imaginary task. Like, what will the future be? And then it's like, well, war has really just come in and colonized that whole domain, which is, like, the domain of political imagination. This is, I think, a story about Hollywood. It's a story about cinema.
Robyn Marasco:It's a story about the actual conduct of war, but like your book, I think also wants to like sit in that place, which is the place where not only our ways of thinking, but our modes of imagination get colonized by this particular discursive project.
Mike Hill:Yeah. You know, there's a epigram somewhere in the book that says, you might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. And, there is a sense in which we're using all familiar term interpolated within a war imaginary without necessarily knowing it. But the interesting part of what you just said that brings me beyond that is the way in which alternative kinds of propositions might be held forth. I mean, what I often hear from people is, oh, man.
Mike Hill:This is so bleak, and everything is war, and war is everywhere. Well, even thinking is war now. And, man, there's just no way out. The hell with it. Liquor's cheaper.
Mike Hill:You know? So, I mean, you know, it just becomes a kind of a cynical spin. I really regret that writing that led to that meeting, I suppose. You could say because, you know, I mean, I think the ecological part of it is perhaps maybe a possibility for a flip side that doesn't give up on net centrism, that doesn't give up on collectivist ways of thinking about identity fluidity, but it would have to be, by definition, beyond the human. That's the premise of on posthuman war.
Mike Hill:But maybe it it also is an invitation to tap into other forms of agency that are nonhuman, but are somehow also political in ways we haven't quite thought through. Certainly, they would not be commodified. They would have to absolutely not be commodified forms of nonhuman agency. That would be, by definition, a reduction in relationality. Right?
Mike Hill:That that has to do with erasing and making absence, you know, those big important real relations that we call labor. But even beyond that, maybe to think about something that once again, to give it away a little bit, the next book, the the military is already doing. It's it was in around 02/2010 that they decided in the midst of all of the climate science denial that they were going to begin war gaming, a world enriched environmental degradation was what they call a force multiplier. When culture became a force multiplier and identity infiltration and and ontological operational superiority became a thing that they were interested, they were already two or three steps ahead of the the game, and that's where the next question of terrain leads. It's not the training of the human being per se, but something like the humanization of terrain, but without the human being per se.
Mike Hill:They're really thinking in ways that Warren already pointed out are incredibly dangerous in terms of the way they fail about, you know, the moment at which it's going to be really easy to move battleships across the North Pole. Right? Because it won't be ice getting in the way. You know? And and things like that.
Mike Hill:And, you know, GE was cloud seeding here in the Hudson Valley in the nineteen fifties. There's a whole history of environmental modification going back to trying to flood out the Ho Chi Minh Trail, to Nixon wanting to bomb the dams, to flood out, you know, the insurgency, and that was rendered at least theoretically illegal by the UN in the late seventies, early eighties. But that was environmental modification by design. In other words, you stick enough iodine in the air or whatever it was they were putting to try to make it rain, and that was thought about as a new military weapon. The idea was to be able to create artificial rain clouds to be able to, you know, produce bad weather for your combatants.
Mike Hill:It's not just environmental modification by design, which the UN has explicitly said is not allowable for what that's worth, but it's environmental modification by default. We've talked a long time. I don't know. Yeah. I just wanna thank you guys again so much.
Mike Hill:I appreciate it even more after hearing what you all had to say, and relearned a lot from your comments, both of you.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book on Posthuman War, Computation and Military Violence is available from University of Minnesota Press. Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.